by Sarah Graves
“George,” Will said wistfully, still watching Ellie, “is one lucky guy.”
Yes, I thought sarcastically, except that he’s in jail. “You were saying Hector did you a favor?”
Across the room Will’s Aunt Agnes sat quietly on a folding chair, gazing wide-eyed at the people milling around her. She looked up confusedly each time another one stopped to greet her.
“Yeah.” Will watched as she accepted a glass of sherry, then busied himself with the serving implements again. “But what you’re really asking is something else,” he went on as he worked. “And to answer the gist of your question, I was in Boston the night before last.”
He waved at the cod cakes. “It’s where I got the makings of those, the fish and seasonings.” His eyes met mine calmly. “I can show you the receipt if you want.”
He was right; it had been precisely the gist of my question, and I liked his straight answer.
“Or,” he added without a hint of rancor, “you could talk to the people I saw there. Some business I had to take care of.”
I liked his not being offended by my curiosity even better. “That’s okay, Will,” I said. “I appreciate your candor. But what did you mean about Jan and Hector doing you a favor?”
He shrugged. “I came back here thinking they were about to make off with my inheritance,” he answered. “But that Agnes, she used to be a sharp cookie and even though she’s failing some now, she was way ahead of me. Way ahead of them, too, it turns out.”
He angled his head in her direction again. “Set up her will so she couldn’t change it without my input, insisted on giving me power of attorney. Lawyer said she told him she didn’t want to be made a fool of, if she ever got too far gone to notice.”
Which now it seemed she had. The people speaking with her wore the sad smiles of visitors who expect not to see you again, or not to be recognized if they do.
“I don’t get it,” I told Will. “That means you never had to come here at all. It was all a waste of . . .”
“No.” He waved his spatula at Agnes. “Just look at her. She raised me, you know, after my folks died. And she must have been going downhill to begin with or it was like George said about his aunt, she’d have never given Jan or Hector the time of day. So who’ll take care of her now if I don’t? Until I arrived I had no idea she was so fragile.”
Almost the first thing he’d had to do was put a wheelchair ramp on her house. Still, she was lovely in an old-lace way; somebody picked up her fallen napkin for her, and the smile she offered in return would’ve broken a tax-man’s heart.
“And now George,” Will finished grimly. “He’s going to need a pal, too. I mean even more pals than he’s already got.”
He raised the warming candle under the asparagus. “I owe him big-time after all he’s done for me. So anything he needs, I mean it, all Ellie has to do is ask.”
I’d have said something appreciative in reply but just then two things happened. The asparagus dish exploded with a startling crack! like a rifle shot.
And somebody upstairs began screaming.
Chapter 5
So what’s the deal with funeral-home franchises, anyway?” I asked. It was evening and Wade was plying me with whiskey sours.
“Can I have it my way? Let’s say I’m a car mechanic, can I get shot up with brake fluid instead of embalming fluid?”
I’d never seen a woman with a knife in her chest before, and I guess he thought a few drinks might ease the experience for me.
It hadn’t. “How about super-size, do they give you a roomier coffin? And cremation, there’s a hot topic.”
Sam and Tommy were in the dining room working on ax2+ bx+c=0, which if it doesn’t equal anything I frankly don’t see much point to. Will had taken Ellie home, saying he’d return to stay with her for a while after he settled his aunt. After that, Wade and the boys had teamed up on the dishes, shooing me into the parlor.
And a few blocks away the police were again swarming over the crime scene that was Harlequin House.
“Any idea how long she’d been there?” Wade asked me gently.
“A while.” I shook my head, seeing it again: Jan Jesperson’s body folded knees-to-chest, arms at her sides, wrapped a couple of times around with packing tape and tucked in a closet the cops hadn’t noticed the first time they’d examined the house.
The closet door had looked like just another of the upstairs hall’s oaken wall panels, without any handle or mark suggesting there had ever been one. Jan’s body had been found when somebody leaned casually against the wall and fell in on it.
The knife had pinned the note to her chest: GUILTY.
After the first scream, the historical society members had reacted to the discovery in a variety of ways: running, shouting, staring, weeping, and in a few cases, fainting. Only Ellie had looked grimly pleased for the merest instant, since if by chance Jan had died after George was arrested . . .
But no such luck. I’m not going into the grisly details, but despite the coal dust she’d been heavily smeared with only a fool could have failed to comprehend that Jan had been dead for days.
As I should have suspected at her house. People might leave their coffeepots on, or music playing. But they wouldn’t leave a laptop full of incriminating files out in plain sight unless they had departed in an awful rush.
Because, for instance, they’d been lured out. “You’re sure the laptop is ruined?” Wade asked me.
It was the first thing I’d thought of, once I understood whose corpse had been found in that closet. “It’s toast. When the power went back over to the Bangor Hydro grid, there must’ve been a surge.”
I’d hotfooted it over there praying I could get in ahead of the police, and I had. But Jan hadn’t been using a power-surge protector. All that could be coaxed onto the machine’s screen was a grey-and-white crosshatch pattern that meant the contents were fried well beyond anything I could do to resurrect them.
“What’d you plan on doing if you did get the files?” Wade asked.
“Don’t know,” I replied morosely, getting up and following him into the kitchen. “But it’s beside the point now. And I didn’t have time to root around in her place looking for backup disks. Assuming she even kept any.”
Angry with myself, I managed a final swallow of whiskey and dumped the rest down the sink. “Wade, why is George doing this? What secret could he have that would possibly make him think it’s better to . . .”
“Get blamed for murder?” Wade shook his head. “Don’t know.”
“If he just came out and said where he was… and it’s such a cruel thing to Ellie. Every bone in her body wants to go and see him but . . .”
“But instead she’s letting him do it his way?” He wrapped me in a bear hug, smelling as always of salt water, fresh air, and the lanolin he used to keep the weather from cracking his skin.
“Maybe he knows Ellie trusts him, Jake. Maybe he knows if he explained his reasons, she would agree with them.”
“I don’t see how.” I pressed my cheek against his flannel shirt. “You don’t suppose he’ll let this go on all the way to trial, do you?”
Or to prison. Awful thought; I banished it quickly. My ears were ringing. “You got me drunk so I’d be out of action for the evening,” I accused him.
“That’s part of it,” he admitted. “Just seems like your coil could use some serious unwinding.”
Because of my funeral-home rant, he meant, although I don’t know why that was what pushed me over the edge, finally, that Hector’s autopsy was done but he wasn’t coming back to Eastport to be laid out and buried. Instead he’d gone at his own premortem wish to an outfit in Rockport, owned by some business pal of his with a string of them all over the state.
“Once upon a time when you died, the people who took care of you afterwards had known you their whole lives, and you’d known them,” I said mournfully.
“Yeah.” He spoke into my hair. “When my mom died, my sisters went o
ver to the funeral parlor and did her hair, and painted her nails with that special polish she liked, that pearly stuff.”
Inside the bear hug it was safe and peaceful, just our two hearts beating. “The rest of us waited at home,” he continued. “Drinking hard, not talking about it until my sisters came back.”
Wade’s two sisters lived far away now, one in California and the other in the port city of Valdez, in Alaska. That was the way it seemed to happen with families in Eastport. Some stayed; others went, and either did or didn’t come back.
“But it’s true,” he added, “I wouldn’t mind you just hanging around here tonight. I’ve got to go out.”
“On a Sunday night?” I pulled away from him. When he said out, he meant on the water, and though the storm had passed us by its effect out there still included gale winds and eight-foot swells.
“Yeah. Coupla more freighters waiting, we gotta get things back on schedule or we’ll have boats lined up to Finland.”
Wade piloted the ships through wild currents, hull-smashing granite ledges, and the chaotic winds with which the entrance to our port is well furnished. But first he rode a tug out to where the behemoths idled and climbed aboard on a metal gang or in the case of less-well-equipped vessels, a dangling ladder.
“Well, if you’ve got to, you’ve got to.” I looked around our kitchen, all shining clean with its floor freshly swept, counters wiped and sink Ajaxed.
Wade had done it all after he and the boys had finished the dishes, in between ferrying whiskey sours to me. Now he squeezed me hard, let go. “Home tomorrow night, maybe.”
I nodded. Women in Eastport had been sending their men out to sea for two centuries; a stiff upper lip was a bred-in facial feature around here.
I faked mine. “Okay.” The dogs got up, Monday shoving her black Labrador head under his left hand, Prill her fake-ferocious red Doberman noggin under his right.
“They’ll take care of me,” I said. As guard dogs the pair were as useful as a bowl of marshmallows but they barked at strangers and since the strangers didn’t know they were in danger of being licked to death by happy goofballs it worked out.
“Just be careful,” I said, handing Wade his work duffel, an old dark-green canvas one he prepacked for journeys like these.
“I will.” Sensing Wade’s departure, even Cat Dancing stood up on top of the refrigerator, raked the kitchen with her cross-eyed glare, then curled to sleep again.
Now there was a guard animal; I once reached blindly into a closet and a cranky Siamese came flying out like a cartoon buzz saw. George said if you tied Cat Dancing to the end of a stick you could use her to trim hedges. But burglars hardly ever climb onto the refrigerator so we were reduced to loving Cat unconditionally, as we would if we had, say, a Tasmanian devil for a house pet.
Wade hugged me hard once more. Then, because time and tide really don’t wait, he was gone.
Which left me in an ocean of silence. But shortly thereafter in the dining room someone pronounced a curse word, and after it a worse one.
Much worse. “Sam?” I called. “You guys okay in there?”
“Fine, Mom.” And then in an urgent whisper to Tommy, “C’mon, man, what’s the matter with you?”
I peeked in and saw them together, Sam in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, gazing with mellow patience at the page of equations he was working on. And Tommy with his carrot hair, round freckled face, and the jug ears he kept threatening to have pinned back.
“Guys, when you’re done, lock up and lights off, okay?”
Tommy glanced up, pencil in hand. The circles under his eyes were purplish half-moons; his forehead was sheened with sweat. His usually ruddy complexion was a sick green, the color of old cheese.
Sam caught my look of startled inquiry and shot me a warning glance. Don’t ask.
So I didn’t. Instead I went upstairs, so boozy and exhausted I could scarcely see straight; later I heard Sam let Tommy out and go around the house shutting things down for the night.
Too bad I couldn’t shut my brain down as easily. My whiskey buzz was gone, leaving that wide-awake-but-too-disorganized-to-do-anything-about-it feeling. Without Wade there beside me eating ice cream and rereading an old Tom Clancy novel—better than a sleeping pill, he always insisted—the big bed was lonesome even with both dogs on it.
And I couldn’t stop seeing Ellie’s expression when we first found Jan. She’d managed to hide her exultant look from the rest but I’d caught it; the awful relief of someone given a reprieve from disaster.
It reminded me of what my alpaca-raising ex-client had said about the money business and why he was getting out. His colleagues were getting Botox shots, he’d explained, to enforce their poker faces, abolishing the subtle changes that might otherwise queer a pitch or sink a deal.
The sweaty palm and killer gut-clench had been my personal gruesome twosome, back in the old days; there’s a drug you can take to get rid of both, I happen to know.
But around here, Botox wasn’t needed. Like the stiff upper lip, the flat, tight expression that had replaced Ellie’s short-lived happiness was bred in the bone. It hid the hurt of losing a job or missing a boat payment; in her case it covered the pain of George’s sudden salvation being snatched away just as suddenly.
I’d have done anything to fix that pain, to wipe it away with something like the equivalent of cosmic Botox. But I couldn’t; not for her or for my old buddy Jemmy Wechsler, sitting somewhere now with the idea of salvation little more than a bitter joke.
Instead I paged through my forensics textbook—I’d made it into possible bedtime reading material by razor-blading all the photographs out of it—pausing to reread carefully any item about estimating times of death. What I needed was something that might put George’s absence outside of the time range the medical examiner had given for Hector’s demise.
In other words, a forensic fluke. But I couldn’t find any. Degree of rigor mortis obviously wasn’t a help, since strychnine poisoning induced the mother of all rigors. Stomach contents were useless; the victim ejected them while succumbing. Livor mortis, the pooling of blood after death, was unrewarding; the poison in question wasn’t a blood thinner and would be unlikely to derange the process. Nor did it alter the time it took for the corneas to cloud, as far as I could discover.
Which left body temperature, which I guessed must be how the medical examiner had made his estimate; that and the fact that no advanced decomposition had yet begun. As it would have now that the sealed room had been opened; another day or so and the body’s condition would have begun deteriorating severely.
Firmly I averted my imagination from this eventuality and picked up Wade’s Tom Clancy novel. If you focused your eyes just right and kept turning pages determinedly, the book was perfectly readable.
At nearly eleven the phone rang, and I answered it.
The next morning I stood at the upstairs hall window as the day exploded into a glory of blue and gold, the last few yellow leaves on the maples backed by the indigo water of Passamaquoddy Bay. Jemmy used to call such views “Kodak moments,” in the same wry way he might say “government expert” or “family values.”
Or “witness protection.” And like Jemmy I had my own pocketful of wry. But something about that sky, its pitiless clarity, sent me unexpectedly back to another bright day many years earlier.
My mother’s body was found in the ruins where she died, or it wasn’t; burnt to ashes and blown off on the wind.
Or not. Victor says I tell it a different way every time. Wade says I can expect to go on being blindsided by it, painfully and at odd moments, for the rest of my life.
He says it will be different every time.
While I was standing there Sam came out of his room. “So who was on the phone last night?” he asked me.
“Ellie. I’m picking her up in a little while.” I turned away from the Kodak moment. “What’s up with Tommy?”
He grimaced, heading for the shower. “Don’t kn
ow. Something sure is bugging him. George, I guess. Or maybe it’s Perry again.”
“Perry Daigle?” I asked, startled.
Tommy’s last name had been Daigle, too, until he changed it to avoid being linked with his notorious uncle. “I thought Perry was in jail.”
“He is. But it’s on another DUI and this time the judge gave him ninety days. So he’s hassling Tommy’s mom for money, get a lawyer to help him out.”
“Hmph. What Perry needs is help putting a gun to his head.”
I didn’t usually say such things in front of Sam. But Perry Daigle was about as worthwhile as your average sewer germ, in my opinion. He’d broken a bone in Tommy’s mother’s face and had put a scar on Tommy’s forehead with his ring, a big gold signet.
Sam rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “Yeah. I guess Tommy was hoping for more action from George, in the Perry department.”
It was George who’d persuaded Perry that it would be an extremely good idea never to lay a hand on Tommy or his mother, ever again.
“And George had been driving Tommy to work in the mornings, too,” Sam went on. “ ’Cause Tommy’s car needed a new fuel pump and he’s still saving up to buy it.”
I nodded. Tommy’s car, with its custom mufflers, oo-OO-gah! horn, and raccoon tail flying from the radio antenna, was a well-known vehicle in Eastport. “So maybe that’s it,” I said. “Losing his ride and so on. Which reminds me—can I borrow yours today?”
“Sure,” he agreed, “I won’t be needing it.” Both of us thinking it would take worse than walking to work, to wipe the smile off Tommy’s face.
“Oh, and your father called,” I said. The crack-of-dawn phone call was another of Victor’s charming habits. “He wanted to know, are you still on for dinner with him tonight?”
Victor had wanted to talk about other things, too, but I didn’t mention them. Besides not waxing violently sarcastic in front of Sam, I tried keeping him out of the dead-body stuff as much as possible. One of us hip-deep in it was enough.